


Four Grains of Sand

by ambiguously



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Family, Gen, Jedi Cousins, us against the world
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-04
Updated: 2016-05-04
Packaged: 2018-05-23 16:36:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6122682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ambiguously/pseuds/ambiguously
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rey grows up on Jakku and the only person she can depend on is her cousin.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Four Grains of Sand

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dadcastellanos](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dadcastellanos/gifts).



> Happy May the 4th, dadcastellanos!

"Watch yourself," Ben said, annoyed with her again.

Rey climbed deeper into the compartment. "I'm okay." At six, she was still tiny enough to crawl into the deepest guts of this wrecked corpse of a ship. Her hands were quick with the few tools they had, and she could pop out parts to stash into the bag slung at her side. Ben was sixteen and far too tall to squeeze in here with her. She heard him moving off to scavenge from another place, but not too far away.

 _"Can you hear me?"_ His mind always tickled her when he talked to her this way.

"Yes!" Rey shouted. She wasn't any good at talking inside her brain yet. Her cousin tried to teach her every night, growing frustrated with her, and frustrated with his inability to teach her.

He never once hit her, though sometimes he had to climb out of the small hut they lived in and go for a long walk to get himself back under control. Those nights were the bad nights, when she was sad and he was mad, and they both wanted to go home so much Rey would cry.

Ben didn't cry. Rey thought he'd feel better if he did.

"We have to stay here," he'd say, slipping into his own pile of blankets next to hers.

"But why?"

"Because we do."

Rey thought about why a lot, as she loosened the bolts from a solid-looking transducer. Why they'd fled the school. Why they'd crashed here. Why Ben got so angry all the time, with himself and with her and with Unkar and with everything.

"Got it!" she shouted as the transducer pulled free. That made five things in her bag, and that was a full day's work.

_"Great. Stay there."_

Rey pretended she didn't hear him. She was a great climber. She could climb out of here and down and show him how good she was. Ben hated bringing her out here with him to scavenge, and he hated that he couldn't quite scavenge enough by himself to keep them both fed. Rey didn't mind. She loved crawling around all over this giant smashed ship. She liked the flow of the circuitry and the grace even in the smashed bulkheads.

Thinking about the ship, she missed her handhold.

She screamed as she fell three meters to the tilted wall that was now the floor. Rey landed hard on her side. Pain scored through her. She felt Ben's panic in her head right before she passed out.

* * *

Rey woke up in a bed, and her arm hurt and wouldn't move. She looked around herself, confused. Nima Outpost didn't have a hospital, only a tiny clinic with a couple of med droids. One of them rolled over to her bedside.

"Speak your name."

Her mouth was dry. "Rey."

"How many digits am I holding?"

"Three." The med droid lifted a cup of warm, stale water. Rey was allowed to drink the whole cup. Water? A bed? She almost felt like she was home again.

"You will rest another hour, and you may go."

"My arm?"

"You have broken the bone. It will be immobilized for sixty days."

Rey focused on the thick bactacast. She couldn't move it at all, and the dull pain had started to itch. "Where's Ben?"

The droid rolled away. Non-medical questions were not in its databanks. Rey sighed and rested against the pillow. A real pillow! She hadn't slept in a real bed with a real pillow since they'd fled the school.

Ben returned when the extra hour of rest was finished. His face was drawn in worry, but he put on a wide grin for her. "Finally awake?"

"My arm hurts."

"I know. I can feel it. The droids gave me medicine for you. You can have some before bed, all right?"

"All right." His whole face was wrong, but Ben scooped her up into his arms and carried her all the way back to their home. He set Rey down in what passed for her bed. She frowned around herself. "Why couldn't I stay there tonight?"

"Because you can't." He went back outside.

When he didn't come back for a long time, Rey tried to talk to him with her mind. _"Where are you?"_

 _"I'm taking a walk."_ She sent him the question. _"Because I'm very mad at you right now. You didn't stay where you were supposed to, and you could have been killed."_ She felt his terrible fear that she had landed on her head instead of her arm. She heard his memory of her scream, and the crunch as she'd hit, and his certainty that he'd failed his only task of taking care of her.

_"I'm sorry."_

He didn't say anything to her for a long time. Rey sat, bored, not ready to sleep and not able to play. She dug out the four small bolts she sometimes wrapped in pieces of rag and used as dolls. The baby part of her wanted to play with them and have the parent dolls rock the little girl doll to sleep. But she couldn't be a baby now, and she was too old for dolls. She held the bolts in her good hand and tried to make them float.

"What are you doing?" Ben came through the flap covering their door.

"Practicing." She squinted her eyes and focused her brain. The littlest bolt, the one she thought of as the little girl bolt, bounced up and hovered in front of her.

"Not bad." Ben reached out with his own powers and made the other three bolts revolve around each other. "How do you feel?"

"Sore. Are you still mad?"

"Yes." He dug out the bottle of medicine. "You can have a little to help you sleep."

His mind wasn't very well shielded and Rey could read his thoughts clearly. He was scared for her, and he was scared for himself, and the visit to the clinic had cost them more money than they had.

"You got a loan from Unkar Plutt?"

He closed himself off instantly. "Don't worry. I just have to do him a few favors. There's another ship he wants to look into. I'll be away for a couple of days, but when I get back, I'll have enough to pay him back and get us set up somewhere a little better."

He was lying to make her feel better. She could tell. Money was a sore spot, one of the easiest ways to set off Ben's temper. He'd sold the wreck of the ship they'd arrived here in for enough money to feed the two of them and buy this sad little hut. It was supposed to be temporary. All this should have been temporary. But food costs, and the price for the use of a transmitter to try and send a message back to his parents, to anyone, was astronomical. The more he tried to hide the truth from her, that they were deeply in debt to Unkar like everyone else in this outpost, the easier she read the worry in his thoughts.

She'd asked him once if there was any way for them to get more money, and she would never forget the darkened expression that came over his face. "No. And don't ask again."

She didn't ask now. Rey took her medicine, and she felt fuzzy afterwards.

"Everything's going to be fine," Ben said, and she fell asleep not believing him.

* * *

Rey helped put together her first speeder when she was seven years old. 'Speeder' was a generous term: the bike barely lifted off the ground and didn't go above walking pace.

"Make it go faster," she said, a frown crossing her face as she lifted off, putting across the sand like a toddler.

"Not until you're bigger." Her cousin folded his arms.

"Yours goes fast." She felt this was unassailable logic.

"Mine does go fast, and when you're bigger, you can ride it. You can't reach the controls yet. You'd fall off and break your arm again. Or your neck."

Rey felt his emotions bubbling around. "Okay," she said, before he could regret letting her have the bike. She kicked off, hovering above the sand. He followed her on his own cobbled-together speeder, going slowly enough he'd stall out if he wasn't careful.

She left her new speeder at home, climbing behind Ben on his and letting him tie her in before they sped off to work.

"I want you to practice your lessons while we're working," he said as they headed up to the wreck. "When we get home tonight, you can recite the seven precepts."

Rey kept from complaining because it wouldn't help. Ben had been training to be a Jedi a lot longer than she had, and he wanted her to learn everything he knew. As she climbed into the command suite looking for scrap, she went over the seven basic precepts of Jedi belief.

She wished he'd teach her more about Jedi powers instead.

Rey tugged at a circuit board, reaching out with the Force to jostle it loose. She needed to collect at least twenty good items today, or supper would be a piece of dried meat each. If she collected more, she could tinker with them and build things.

A Jedi does not fear. Fear, anger, hate, these lead to the Dark Side.

Rey felt afraid more than she wanted to say. She was afraid of the dark spaces deep inside the ships. She was afraid of the sounds at night outside their hut. She was afraid they would stay here forever.

Ben was still paying off his debt to Plutt. He'd go away to the far crash and come back days later, not having slept, covered in scratches and small wounds. "It's fine," he said every time Rey asked, but it wasn't fine, and he spent too much of his time at home walking out in the sand. She wasn't allowed to scavenge on her own when he was gone. There was something that almost passed for a school in Nima Outpost, and Rey would walk there to listen to the teachers. Now she could take her own bike.

Rey was afraid one day he'd walk away and not come back.

She wouldn't make a good Jedi, not at all.

* * *

When she was eight, they moved out of the hut into a ruined walker. It was much bigger than their previous home, and she had her very own room inside the head. She still had to listen to Ben snore, but he was further away. She was happy with her new place to live, but sad inside.

"Is Daddy coming for us?"

Ben looked up from his plate of food. They had enough stores to get through a short sandstorm now, instead of grumbling hungry like they had during the last two.

"I'm sure he will."

"Why can't we go look for him?"

"We don't have a ship. If I keep working the far wreck, we can save enough money to buy an old junker to fix up. Then we can go."

Rey went quiet. She didn't like it when Ben left. She was allowed to go scavenge with the groups of children Plutt ran, but he took most of their cut. Ben said she ought to go to school, but school was dull. She could read and write, and her cousin was the only teacher who knew how to train her to be a mighty Jedi Knight, even if she understood that he only knew a little.

Before bed, they cut each other's hair. Ben's would be too short to cover his ears for another week or so, which meant more grouching. He cut off his braid last year. She asked him to cut hers tonight, but he refused. "You're still a student." He tugged gently at the thin plait. "You keep this until you're a full Jedi."

"You're not a Jedi yet."

"I'm too old to train now. My job is to take care of you." He covered it with a goofy smile but she felt the sorrow under his words, and that sadness lingered as he carefully gathered all the scraps of their dark hair to dispose of.

* * *

Ben had been gone three days when Rey felt sharp panic claw into her heart. She was midway through the ship, working with two other kids, hot as blazes and tired, and her vision went dark. She felt a shattering pain everywhere.

"You okay?" Kerdo asked her.

 _"Ben?"_ He didn't reply.

"I have to go," she said, nimbly climbing out of the air duct where they'd been crawling.

"You can't go. We owe Plutt twenty-five pieces each."

Rey didn't reply. She slid down the side, careful not to fall, and went out into the sun. She'd brought her own bike. The heartache inside her wanted to run off after him immediately, but instead she returned home to get food and water and her good cloak to keep the sand off as she rode.

She'd retuned the engine on her little speeder, just a bit here and there. Ben hadn't noticed she no longer only flew at a walk. Still, she felt painfully slow scooting off to where she'd felt him go time and time again. He took the better part of a day to get there walking, less now that he could ride. Time ticked past her.

A Jedi does not fear.

Crying was probably not allowed, either.

She reached the wreck well after dark, when the sparkling stars above and the freezing dunes below spoke of monsters and blood and death. She remembered the night the ships had landed at the school, remembered the fire and the screaming, remembered Ben grabbing her and shoving her into a ship he barely knew how to fly.

If he died, she'd be alone here in the darkness.

She felt him even from outside, and followed the pain through the unfamiliar hulk of the ship. This ship dwarfed the ones they usually scavenged. No wonder Plutt wanted its treasures. The cavernous hull sported hundreds of treacherous pathways.

Ben lay at the bottom of one slippery corridor tilted crazily into the sky. The only way she knew he was still alive was the pain she felt radiating from him.

"Ben?"

Her cousin cracked his eyes open. His face was all bruised. Even his huge ears were bruised. He hissed and tried to move, tried to speak. He couldn't.

A Jedi doesn't fear. A Jedi doesn't fall into screaming panic because she doesn't know what to do. _"Tell me what to do."_

 _"Go home."_ She felt his despair, his worry for her out here in the night. He expected to die. Her eyes crowded with hot tears. _"Go home, Rey."_

She took out one of the water canisters and placed it against his mouth. Ben couldn't protest, and took several long drinks. He'd been here in the scorching heat and now freezing cold of the ship's belly for hours without water. If she hadn't come tonight, he would have been dead by morning.

_"Did you break your leg?"_

_"I think I broke my back."_ Terror threatened to overtake him, and Rey could only pick out a few images. Ben was sure the injury would be fatal. He'd never walk again. He'd die here in this hulk and his skeleton would join the bodies of the lost crew.

Rey reached out to look at him from inside, feeling along the bones and nerves of his body. In her mind, Ben was a weird outline of bones and tubes, and there was the break.

This wasn't so different from fixing a broken line on her bike. Her powers weren't as strong as his, but she knew about tinkering. Rey told the parts of him that had cracked to go right back together, thank you. Four ribs knitted together as she scolded them. _"You too,"_ she said to the snapped bones in his legs.

Ben tried to argue, and pain shot through him as the bones jammed themselves together under Rey's concentration. He screamed, scaring her.

After a long time, he lay there, still hurt, but healing. "What did you do?"

"Fixed you."

Almost. She could fix his poor bones. She couldn't do anything about the rough places inside his mind and the hard places in his heart.

He blinked, and she felt his pain fading. Jedi magic. She'd done proper Jedi magic.

"Not bad," he said, and he smiled his crooked smile, reaching out to take her hand and squeezing.

* * *

They'd been here almost five years when Rey felt the distant presence of someone else's mind. She'd been making her own scavenging runs for six months, working in one wreck while Ben scouted out new ones. He wouldn't go back to the far site, which meant they couldn't save up as much money as he wanted. They'd need another couple of years even to buy their own ruined ship back from Plutt.

 _"Do you feel that?"_ she asked him, busy yanking some cables free. The good stuff was behind here, she just knew it.

_"Get back to the Outpost right now. It's urgent."_

Rey paused. She could definitely get a good haul today if she stayed. Ben's idea of 'urgent' could be anything from 'the house is on fire' to 'I just saw someone good-looking and I'm going to be out tonight.'

_"Rey."_

_"All right. I'm coming."_

She hurried out of the wreck, annoyed at her paltry haul. She was growing fast. She wouldn't be able to climb into the best places much longer. She kicked her speeder bike into gear and hurried towards the Outpost.

Ships came and went a few times a day. Rey wasn't surprised when another flew in for a landing. She was far more surprised to see it was a familiar Corellian freighter. She almost fell off her bike in excitement. But of course Ben had known. Rey barely remembered her aunt and uncle, but Ben had been longing to see them for years.

She waited, hoping he got here soon, anxious and happy and more, and afraid to get close without him. She heard his bike zooming near. He parked it next to hers. The same riot of emotions she felt was on his face. He turned to her quickly, wiping his face with his hand, smoothing his unruly hair. "Do I look okay?"

She told him the same thing she always did when he asked before going out on a date. "You look like a dweeboid."

"Are you ready?"

They walked together towards the ship, Rey unsure what they'd say, how they'd tell Aunt Leia who they were. But she'd already turned, sensing them. She broke into the most relieved smile Rey had ever seen as she ran to them and took Ben into an enormous hug.

"We've been searching every planet for you," she said, not admitting she was crying. Uncle Han and Chewbacca finally saw them and headed over. "Luke said you were alive."

"Where's Daddy?"

Leia finally pulled free of hugging Ben, and let Uncle Han take a long turn pretending he wasn't crying, either. Leia bent to Rey and hugged her, filling her with love and relief. "He's been looking, too. We've all been looking." She pulled back and brushed Rey's hair from her face. "Are you all right? What have you been doing all this time on, what's this planet called?"

"Jakku," said Uncle Han.

"Taking care of each other," Ben said, and he rested his hand on Rey's shoulder.


End file.
